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If the sellxgadget.com is your domain and all of your keywords contain sellxgadget in the keyword with “v1” or “v2” or “v3” in it then as per my understanding, the best approach would be to go with the first option. That is: sellxgadget.com/v1 Here are few of the reason why I will go with the first option: -          The overall size of the URL will be small and it’s important for the URLs to be not too long. The URL is covering all your keywords and yet small in size. -          It didn’t seem spammy to me! The keywords are in the URL but not over optimized. Hope this helps!

I believe that canonical does pass link assets.   If you have a canonical on Page A, pointing to Page B, all of the links that go to Page A will start showing in the link profile for Page B in Google Webmaster Tools. They will show in WMT as..... Via this intermediate link:  http://yourdomain.com/page-a